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Security

In this part of the tutorial we will introduce you to XAP security, where it fits in the XAP architecture, which components can be secured, and how to configure and customize the security depending on your application security requirements. XAP Security provides comprehensive support for securing your data and services.

Security in XAP

Security is made up of Authentication and Authorization.

Authentication

Authentication is the process of establishing and confirming the authenticity of a principal. A principal in GigaSpaces terms, means a user (human or software) performing an action in your application. A principal in XAP terms means a user (human or software) performing an action in your application. XAP Security is equipped with standard encryption algorithms (such as AES and MD5), which can be easily configured and replaced. The authentication layer is provided with a default implementation, which can be customized to integrate with other security standards. This layer is also known as the authentication manager. You can integrated the authentication layer through Spring Security to use LDAP or Data Base authentication.

Authorization

Authorization refers to the process of deciding whether a principal is allowed to perform a certain action. The authorization decision layer is totally independent from the authentication layer. The authorization decision manager is internal to XAP components and is used to intercept unauthorized access/operations to data and services. This layer uses roles that are made up of authorities which contain a set of permissions.

Role Based Security

XAP’s authorization implementation is based on roles. A role is comprised of a collection of authorities where an authority has a set of permissions. There are four categories of user authorities; System, Grid, Space and Monitoring.

System Authority

The System Authority consists of two privileges:

Manage Roles

Define roles (a set of privileges assigned to a logical role name)

Manage Users

Assign users to pre-defined roles, or assign user-specific privileges

Grid Authority

The Grid Authority consists of privileges for managing the Grid and its Services (GSMs, GSCs, Processing Units).

Provision PU

Deploy, Un-deploy of processing units

Manage PU

Scale up/down, Relocate, Restart PU instance, Destroy PU instance

Manage Grid

Start, Terminate, Restart of GSC/GSM/LUS via GSA

Space Authority

The Space Authority consists of privileges for operations on space data.

Write

Write and Update operations

Create

Write only (no Update) operations

Read

Read, Count and Notify operations

Take

Take and Clear operations

Alter

Register type descriptor, Clean and Drop-Class operations

Execute

Execute tasks

Monitoring Authority

The Monitor Authority consists of privileges for monitoring the Grid and its Processing Units.
Note that the monitoring is secured only by the ‘tooling’ (CLI/UI).

Managing Roles

You can create new roles and users with a configuration file or with the Admin UI. Here is an example how you use the Admin UI to create/update roles. Lets create a role called “training” that can access and interact with our xapTutorialSpace, but does not have monitoring authority.
Start the Admin UI:

GS_HOME\bin\gs-ui.sh

The default username and password for the security are admin/admin.

You may have noticed that you can assign fine grained access control for space operations (read/write/etc) per space class(slide 4).

Managing Users

A user is assigned roles. You can create new roles and users with a configuration file or with the Admin UI. Here is an example how you use the Admin UI to create/update users. Lets create a user called student and assign the role training we have just created in the step above. A user can have multiple roles.

Grid Security

Grid Security is enabled in XAP by setting a global system property. This system property can be set when using the deployment scripts, or it can be appended in the setenv.sh/bat script in the GS_HOME/bin directory. Once the Grid Security is enabled, you can use the predefined roles and user names to protect and control the grid access.

-Dcom.gs.security.enabled=true

This property affects the GSA, GSM, GSC and standalone PU instances with a space.